People hold a banner with the words ‘Stop Russia’ during a march in front of Russian embassy in Warsaw, commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s invasion of the eastern part of Poland at the outbreak of World War II.
AFP/Warsaw
Poles yesterday marked 75 years since the Soviet Union invaded, after plotting with Nazi Germany to wipe Poland off the map during World War II.
“Seventy-five years ago today, while Poland fought Hitler alone, the Soviet Union stabbed us in the back,” Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said in a tweet marking the September 17, 1939 assault.
That attack swiftly followed Germany’s strike on the Polish Baltic port city of Gdansk on September 1, which kicked off a devastating war that left 60mn people dead.
That included 6mn Poles, half of them Jews.
The Soviet attack had been laid out in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a secret accord between Berlin and Moscow detailing the partition of Poland.
By October 6, Polish forces were crushed and Poland ceased to exist.
This year’s anniversary comes amid renewed tensions between Warsaw and Moscow over the bloody crisis in neighbouring Ukraine, where government forces are battling pro-Moscow separatists.
A staunch supporter of the Kiev government, Warsaw has strongly condemned Russia’s actions in the region - including its annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in March.
Polish veteran Andrzej Kwiatkowski, who as a teenager joined the doomed Polish resistance to fight the Nazis and the Soviets, is worried history could repeat itself.
“Of course we were afraid of the Germans, but we weren’t afraid of the Russians because nobody knew they would invade Poland in 1939,” the 85-year-old told AFP.
“England was supposed to help us, France was supposed to help, but we know what really happened,” he said, pointing to the failure of Poland’s allies to protect it.
“Today, everyone is making promises, the president of the US and other politicians, that they will defend us. Will they really do so? Who knows?” added Kwiatkowski, who the Soviets sentenced to eight years in the Siberian gulag for his resistance activities.
Moscow took more than 200,000 Polish soldiers as prisoners of war, deporting them into the depths of the USSR along with hundreds of thousands of Polish civilians it deemed “enemies of the people”.
Nearly 22,000 Polish officers, including top brass, were executed on Stalin’s orders, notably in the Katyn forest - a war crime that Moscow falsely blamed on the Nazis for decades.
Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski yesterday opened an exhibition dedicated to the Katyn victims, in the wing of a Warsaw museum focussed on the massacre, and which is slated for an official opening next year.
“Today, our remembrance of the Katyn crime takes on a special new meaning as Poland’s security is no longer so obvious,” he said.
After Russia annexed Crimea, Poland and its Baltic neighbours asked Nato to beef up its presence in the region once dominated by Moscow.
